In the Beginning...Was the Command Line Read Online Free PDF Page B

is understanding all of their features, whereas OSes get hacked by coders who are annoyed by their limitations. The OS business has been good to Microsoft only insofar as it has given them the money they needed to launch a really good applications software business and to hire a lot of smart researchers. Now it really ought to be jettisoned, like a spent booster stage from a rocket. The big question is whether Microsoft is capable of doing this. Or is it addicted to OS sales in the same way as Apple is to selling hardware?
    Keep in mind that Apple’s ability to monopolize its own hardware supply was once cited, by learned observers, as a great advantage over Microsoft. At the time, it seemed to place them in a much stronger position. In the end, it nearly killed them, and may kill them yet. The problem, for Apple, was that most of the world’s computer users ended up owning cheaper hardware. But cheap hardware couldn’t run MacOS, and so these people switched to Windows.
    Replace “hardware” with “operating systems,” and “Apple” with “Microsoft,” and you can see the same thing about to happen all over again. Microsoft dominates the OS market, which makes them money and seems like a great idea for now. But cheaper and better OSes are available, and they are growingly popular in parts of the world that are not so saturated with computers as the U.S. Ten years from now, most of the world’s computer users may end up owning these cheaper OSes. But these OSes do not, for the time being, run any Microsoft applications, and so these people will use something else.
    To put it more directly: every time someone decides to use a non-Microsoft OS, Microsoft’s OS division, obviously, loses a customer. But, as things stand now, Microsoft’s applications division loses a customer too. This is not such a big deal as long as almost everyone uses Microsoft OSes. But as soon as Windows’ market share begins to slip, the math starts to look pretty dismal for the people in Redmond.
    This argument could be countered by saying that Microsoft could simply recompile its applications to run under other OSes. But this strategy goes against most normal corporate instincts. Again the case of Apple is instructive. When things started to go south for Apple, they should have ported their OS to cheap PC hardware. But they didn’t. Instead, they tried to make the most of their brilliant hardware, adding new features and expanding the product line. But this only had the effect of making their OS more dependent on these special hardware features, which made it worse for them in the end.
    Likewise, when Microsoft’s position in the OS world is threatened, their corporate instincts will tell them topile more new features into their operating systems, and then re-jigger their software applications to exploit those special features. But this will only have the effect of making their applications dependent on an OS with declining market share, and make it worse for them in the end.
    The operating system market is a death trap, a tar pit, a slough of despond. There are only two reasons to invest in Apple and Microsoft. (1) Each of these companies is in what we would call a codependency relationship with their customers. The customers Want To Believe, and Apple and Microsoft know how to give them what they want. (2) Each company works very hard to add new features to their OSes, which works to secure customer loyalty, at least for a little while.
    Accordingly, most of the remainder of this essay will be about those two topics.

THE TECHNOSPHERE
    Unix is the only OS remaining whose GUI (a vast suite of code called the XWindow System) is separate from the OS in the old sense of the phrase. This is to say that you can run Unix in pure command line mode if you want to, with no windows, icons, mouses, etc. whatsoever, and it will still be Unix and capable of doing everything Unix is supposed to do. But the other OSes—MacOS, the Windows family, and